The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  24

  THE VISIBILITY IS ONLY THREE MILES WITH THE SKY PARTIALLY obscured by haze. There’s too much moisture in the air—humidity is about 35%. And the smog thickens the mix.

  I study the sectional yet again and carefully note the ARSA approach frequencies. Chino is under the ARSA centered around Ontario Airport, eight miles north. East of Ontario is the Norton Air Force Base ARSA. West of Ontario is Pomona, with an airport traffic area that reaches up to 3,000 feet. Ten miles east of Chino is Riverside Airport, which also has an airport traffic area. March Air Force Base is southeast of Riverside. Eight miles south of Chino are hills, one with a peak of 3,085 feet. South of that row of hills are Marine Corps Air Station El Toro and John Wayne—Orange County Airport. To the west of Chino lies the great malignant mushroom of the Los Angeles TCA and all the airports in its shadow—LAX, Los Alamitos, Long Beach, Burbank, El Monte, Torrance and so on.

  This basin is no place for a fellow without navigation aids to wander around semi-lost. You’ll get a flight violation quicker than an IRS agent can clean out your wallet. Full of misgivings, I strap on the Queen and light off the Lycoming.

  After an intersection takeoff the Queen climbs quickly to 1,500 feet. A left turn clears the traffic pattern; then I ask Tower if I can switch to Ontario Approach. They grant permission.

  I want desperately to avoid getting lost in this soup in the two or ten minutes it will take for Approach to pick me up and grant me permission to enter the ARSA. I make a left turn and place Chino Airport on my left wing as I make my call. Straight east five or six miles is a four-lane highway running north and south. If I hold over that highway I should be clear of both the Chino and Riverside airport traffic areas and under the Ontario ARSA.

  Approach answers immediately and assigns me a discrete squawk. I dial it in and look again for Chino Airport. Still visible. I am debating whether to make a tight 180 to keep it in sight or fly east to the highway when Approach announces radar contact and grants me permission to head north through the ARSA.

  Well, that was easy. Today. They’re obviously not very busy. A fellow wouldn’t want to try this without nav aids on a soupy day with a flock of migratory airliners coming and going. Then Approach will just tell you to stay clear, if they condescend to talk to you at all.

  Climbing through 3,000 feet I top the hazy marine layer and visibility instantly improves to maybe 15 miles. El Cajon Pass is ten degrees right. Beyond it is the Mohave.

  I go through at 5,500 feet and follow the interstate toward Barstow. The air above the dirty, yellow-brown land is hot. Wispy high clouds merely diffuse the sunlight without weakening it. In minutes I am sweating in the cockpit under my leather jacket.

  At Barstow the winds are supposedly calm. That is what the FBO man tells me on the radio. But on final approach I find they are shifting around all over the compass at four or five knots. The landing is a typical desert arrival—I’m proud that I didn’t scrape a wingtip.

  I shut down by the fuel pump and stow the jacket in the baggage bin. The temperature here is in the high nineties. Baking in the sun are rows of Army olive-drab helicopters in front of three long, white, clapboard hangars. I’ve never seen anything quite like these hundred-yard-long sheds. They look like they might have once held a hundred cavalry horses each.

  The FBO man asks where I’m bound and I tell him up toward Vegas. “Good luck at the tables,” he says.

  “Won’t be doing any of that,” I assure him. “I’m going on up toward Zion and Bryce Canyon.”

  Northeast of Barstow the desert seems lifeless from three thousand feet above it. The peaks are black rock. Alluvial skirts of sand and gravel fan out below them and peter out on the harsh brown flats. The watercourses are quite plain, but there is no water. Not a drop. All this erosion resulted from occasional showers and thunderstorms, only a few inches of water a year total. So the stark, eroded landscape is a profound monument to the immensity of time.

  In this bleak wilderness of sand and stone there are few good places for an emergency landing. Inevitably any spot you choose will have a boulder or a gulley in the wrong place that will wipe off the landing gear or flip the plane onto its nose or back. A forced landing—that is one where the engine is still running and you can fly around down low for awhile to find a likely spot—has a better chance. If you can, find a road.

  Passing Baker I look left, off to the northwest, at Death Valley. The heat shimmering off the desert up that way vaporizes my vague desire to land at Furnace Creek in the heart of Death Valley. At 211 feet below sea level, the airport there is the lowest in the United States. I’ve landed at Furnace Creek before in other airplanes in the winter or fall. In early August the heat will be truly awesome. I like the Lycoming engine on the Cannibal Queen too much to subject it to that kind of abuse.

  That thought automatically brings my eyes to the engine gauges. Cylinder head temp is 220 degrees, the hottest I’ve ever seen it. Oil temp is 165 and pressure is steady at 50, the minimum safe pressure.

  I’m bouncing again in desert thermals so I let the updrafts carry the Queen higher. The air will be cooler the higher I get and I have a 4,630-foot-high pass ahead, just south of Clark Mountain in the Tonopah Range. The turbulence in that pass may be fierce today, so I hit it high, at 7,500 feet, and cross with no problem.

  Out here in the desert the visibility is excellent, easily a hundred miles, so Las Vegas is visible quite a distance away. I leave the interstate and head east across the McCullough Range. The highest peak here is under me at 7,026 feet, but the winds forced upward by the mountains slam the Queen around.

  On the eastern side of the McCulloughs is a salt flat, then a gentle incline up to Boulder City overlooking Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. The airport is a new one on the southwest side of the city, on the slope below the town. It’s 2,200 feet above the ocean.

  The Unicom guy says the wind is out of the north and suggests runway 33. I make a left base entry and am soon floating down final, floating so much that I know the wind is behind me. Toying with the idea of going around, I keep descending.

  There’s a wind sock at the approach end and it verifies the wind is out of the south, behind me, at seven or eight knots. At least it’s not a crosswind. I’ll give it a try.

  With the power at idle I begin my flare. A wind sock at midfield catches my eye—wind out of the west at seven or eight.

  I fly through the shift just before the wheels touch. Left wing down, right rudder, stick slamming around to hold her, then she’s on. As I roll out I see a third wind sock at the upwind end of this runway: this one indicates the wind is out of the north! At seven or eight knots.

  The line boys who help me fuel the Queen are Indians. “How hot is it?” I ask.

  “Last I looked, a hundred and four.”

  Well, Coonts, you wanted desert. By gum, boy, you got it!

  Lake Mead is emerald green from 2,500 feet above it. The sand-colored rock ridges are visible after they enter the green water: they seem to descend into infinite green depths as shadows until finally the yellowish color is completely merged with the green of the water. Speedboats pulling water skiers plow the surface.

  North of Lake Mead I pick up the interstate just east of the Mormon Mesa VOR. The white cone of the radio nav aid is quite prominent amid the rock and dirt of this hot, empty land. And Lordy, it is hot!

  I take a squint at the engine instruments and my heart sinks. The oil temperature is up to 175 degrees and the pressure is down to 45, 5 PSI below the green. As oil gets hotter it gets thinner. Is it lubricating the engine properly? Cylinder head temp is only 190, so maybe.

  How the heck would I know?

  Now I fret. My eyes keep coming back to the oil temp and pressure gauges. If I try to climb to cooler air the climb will really cook the oil. I reduce power an inch. Maybe that will help. Since nothing is free, the immediate result is the loss of five miles per hour in airspeed. That means less air is going through the cooling fins of the cylinders. />
  Have I developed an oil leak? I use my hand to wipe the sides of the Queen. Dry as usual. No oil film on the forward windshield.

  The air’s just too darned hot. That’s what it is.

  St. George, Utah, is just ahead through the pass. I decide to land and sit for a couple hours until the air cools a little. That oil pressure needle below the green arc is impossible to disregard.

  My call on Unicom is answered promptly. The wind is 240 at 12. Recommend runway 16. Okay.

  My first look at the field makes my stomach churn. The single asphalt runway sits on top of a ridge that drops steeply away on all sides, especially the approach end. And the approach end of runway 16 is guarded by a huge hill to the west. The wind is coming around the south end of that prodigious hill and roaring up that steep slope to the runway. Hill? Big as it is, it’s a mountain to this West Virginia boy.

  I keep the right wing down as I flare and let the right wheel make first contact. I can feel the wind shift toward the right. She bounces. Stick back and right and lots of left rudder, and still I swerve alarmingly before I save it.

  Disgust washes over me. Damn this desert flying! Another religious experience. Before this trip is over I’m going to be qualified to live in a monastery.

  It’s 102 degrees at the St. George airport, which is 2,938 feet above sea level. The wind is 12 knots gusting to 21. The line boy tells me about the wind. “Always comes humping from the west in the afternoon. You gotta get here before noon if you want to avoid it.”

  At 6 P.M. I’m rolling down the runway feeding in right stick and left rudder to keep the Queen straight as the strong right cross wind makes the plane goosey. Now I lift the left wheel, then the right. Airborne, crabbing, but she’s climbing!

  The wind squirts the Queen eastward across the town of St. George when I turn in that direction. Away from the ridge upon which the airport sits the air is calmer and the plane climbs smoothly but slowly. The shadows are lengthening in the little city below and streaming eastward off the mesas that stand to the north and south.

  The two hours on the ground allowed the oil to cool. It stabilizes at 160 degrees and 60 PSI. Now if it will just stay there!

  Heat and wind are part and parcel of the desert’s stark beauty, which you either love or hate. There can be no in-between. The land is too primal for subtle emotions. And too big. Only mortal man is small here.

  I steer the Cannibal Queen northward across Hurricane Mesa toward the great red cliffs of Zion, then turn and fly southeast with the cliffs off my left wing.

  A gnat flying by the face of God, that is what I am. The size of the jagged red cliffs overwhelms me. The inanimate, basic power of stone that has resisted wind and water through the eons fills me with awe. Life is uncertain, life is short, life is filled with pain and joy, yet these great red cliffs endure the ages, only occasionally yielding a grain of sand.

  All my ambitions, all my dreams, all my hopes, they are as a gust of evening wind against the grandeur of the red cliffs.

  And what am I? The God who raised the stone from the place where it was made into this position and rejoices at its constancy, what does He expect of me? What could I possibly achieve to be worthy of His notice in my short span upon the earth?

  Man is a foolish little creature, worried about transitory things. We are all, each of us, saturated with that egocentric silliness that causes some of the women in Boulder to fret about the intensity of their orgasms. Do you really think the Creator of billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, has time for silly, tiny man?

  The gods of old were all little gods. Science has ripped away the veil of time and distance and shrunk us to our proper place in the great scheme of things, yet we still cling to our ancient, little gods like a drowning man clings to a board.

  Little people in little rooms in little places purport to tell us the eternal truths. People that don’t understand the most basic laws of physics tell us with straight faces that they have mastered the incomprehensible. How could they know?

  The airport at Bryce Canyon, Utah, has the only log hangar I’ve ever seen. Built in the 1930s by the WPA, the big hangar is visible for many miles if you have a good angle on the sun.

  I like this airport and the location, 7,500 feet above sea level on a great mesa. The east side of the mesa is composed of soft pink stone that forms the spectacular cliffs of Bryce Canyon National Park. The south end of the mesa, which is in the park, is a high pine forest. Yet the gentle swale north of the park where the airport is located is treeless. A couple miles farther north the land rises and is covered with trees again.

  Elevation is the key to life in this rugged country. The tree line is a contour line—only a few feet in elevation means the difference between enough water to sustain trees year after year and mere prairie grass. Lower still is the desert.

  I cross above the national park shivering at 11,500, still flying in a short-sleeve shirt after my day in the desert, and slip the Cannibal Queen onto Bryce’s 7,000-foot strip of asphalt. After taxiing forever I arrive at the little mat in front of the log hangar and maneuver the Queen into a tiedown spot for the night. The air temperature here is a mere 75 degrees.

  Two men are sitting on a log bench in front of the hangar. One is elderly, the other I soon learn is the FBO man. I am barely out of the cockpit when they wander over to inspect the Queen. I have a reservation tonight at Ruby’s Inn, the biggest of the three motels hereabouts, and they advertise they will send a car over to pick up folks at the airport. I call them from the phone inside and they say they’ll be over in a bit.

  So I sit on the log bench and talk to the old man. From Florida, he is living in an RV parked beside the hangar, has been here since July 7 and is going to stay until the desert down below cools off. Then he’ll probably go down to Bullhead City, Arizona, on the Colorado River. Laughlin, Nevada, is right across the river. Every evening boats ferry people across the river to the gambling joints. But it’s hotter than holy hell down in Bullhead right now, so the old man is whiling away the summer at the airport in Bryce.

  “I’m an airport bum,” he tells me. “Been one since 1946. Like to hang out at the airport and watch the planes come and go.”

  The daughter of the FBO man sits with us and plays with her cat. She talks to it and won’t let it escape. Finally it jumps down and runs for the trailer behind the hangar where the family lives, the girl running after it.

  The old man and I talk about airports and planes and Bryce Canyon. A half hour passes, then forty-five minutes, and I’m still waiting. Ruby’s van is taking its time. But the company is pleasant, the sun is low on the horizon and, all in all, it’s been another great day of flying, a fine day to be alive.

  “They’ll want five bucks now for the ride to Ruby’,” the old man informs me. “When they get around to showing up.”

  “They never used to charge.”

  “They quit giving free rides from the airport the first of the year. Now they want five bucks a head and two dollars more if you have luggage.”

  “It’s only a couple miles over there.”

  “I know. Ain’t right. Some of the people arriving here have been arguing with them about it.”

  I can understand that. Flight Guide says Ruby’s offers free airport pickup.

  The van shows up an hour after I called. The sun is just setting. As we drive away I look over my shoulder at the lonesome log hangar and the Cannibal Queen sitting in front. The old man is still sitting on the bench.

  The young woman driving apologizes for the delay and tells me cheerfully that she won’t charge me tonight for the ride since she was so late.

  Five dollars! The whole subject irritates me. Welcome back to earth!

  Friday morning when I arrived at the airport a man and woman were preflighting an American Eagle biplane parked beside the Stearman. I visited a moment with the old man, who was back on the bench, then packed the Queen and taxied her to the fuel pump. The Eagle pilot and I started
engines at about the same time and were soon ready to taxi. I got on the radio.

  “Eagle, this is the Stearman. If you want to taxi down the runway behind me, you can swing around and take off first.”

  They took me up on it. When the smaller plane was safely airborne, I rolled the Stearman.

  The Cannibal Queen climbs into the thin morning air at a pace suitable for a dowager. The Eagle slashes in and settles on my right wing as I swing the Queen southeast across the cliffs, then turn south.

  Now the Eagle crosses under and surfaces on the left side. I snap a few with the camera. After a minute or two the pilot goes back to the right side. He’s three or four wingspans away at all times, which I appreciate. I have no idea how good a formation pilot he is and I don’t want him in tight trying to show me.

  The Eagle is a snappy, fully aerobatic biplane much smaller than a Stearman. The two people sitting in tandem are covered by a bubble canopy. With a conventional, horizontally opposed flat engine, she has good performance and excellent economy. The paint job on this one is uninspired, but you can’t hold that against the plane.

  Finally the Eagle crosses under to my left wing, then turns away to the east as the pilot says good-bye on the radio. Soon she is tail on to me. In moments she disappears into the bright blue eastern sky and the Cannibal Queen is once again alone.

  The Grand Canyon, which is Spanish for “big ditch,” is a stupendous jagged tear in the earth’s crust that mere words cannot describe. It must be seen and felt to be believed.

  Of course nature displays her finest masterpiece to best advantage. Oriented east and west to catch the morning and evening sun, the canyon must be approached from north or south by man the insect. On the ground this journey is a gradual climb through pine forests as the land swells gently upward toward the rim. Then, like a curtain being raised, there it is!

  Even jaded teenagers who have been everywhere and seen everything are stunned into silence by their first look. At the rim overlooks people point and whisper.